Archive A Vehicle? (Change Ownership)

[madmoneymike5]

Is there currently, or if there isn't, can you please implement, a way to archive (but not delete permanently) a vehicle a customer no longer owns? For example, one of my customers decided to sell his Jeep last month to someone who isn't one of my customers. So, we'll likely never see the vehicle again. However, as a policy so that we can later print a vehicle's history if requested, we don't delete vehicles out of our database. Therefore, it'd be nice if we could 'hide' or archive vehicles we are not going to need to access again.

This may seem trivial for someone who has just a handful of vehicles at most, but what about fleet accounts? This would come in especially handy for them as it is likely they will be disposing of vehicles more often.

[brianp87]

You can. You create a customer named archive or sold or whatever. Then you just remove the license plate # and transfer ownership to this.

[madmoneymike5]

This is not quite what I'm looking for. If the method suggested above were to be implemented, it have the undesirable side affect of losing track of who owned what car. This, in turn, would make it very difficult after some time to track down a specific vehicle to print its history when asked by a customer, or whatever the task may be. There would also be other complications, such as when it comes to running customer-related reports and mail merge operations. I'm sure there are perhaps others I am not thinking of.

The ideal solution would be to archive each car (as necessary/applicable) without deleting it and without losing track of who owned that vehicle while it was being serviced at our shop.

[Pauls Automotive]

The system still holds onto the deleted vehicles history. For example Mrs. Jones sells her car to Mr. Smith so you delete Mrs. Jones car from her account. Say 2 years later the buyer calls to ask if a timing belt was done. You can go into Mrs. Jones account via "Utilities", then "Customer Screen" the browse for Mrs. Jones. This opens to a 3 Tab customer screen. Go to the history tab. There are two choise to display by...Vehicle and Customer. Pick customer and all vehicles ever owned by her will show up. Even if the vehicle is deleted. Just double click and print.

[ARS]

We made up a separate account called sold vehicles... if we know that the customer sold, junked or totaled a vehicle we move it to this file. It helps to clean up the customer's accounts... sometimes people get emails about their vehicles that they got rid of.. so this helps with that situation. When moving it to sold.. we do a couple things... in the vehicle memo- we put the customer's name in it. We delete the license plate & transfer any recommends to the memo (so they do not show up on future follow-up reports) & then we delete the inspection date or move it to the memo ( for the same reason).

Hope This Helps,
ARS

[madmoneymike5]

The system still holds onto the deleted vehicles history. For example Mrs. Jones sells her car to Mr. Smith so you delete Mrs. Jones car from her account. Say 2 years later the buyer calls to ask if a timing belt was done. You can go into Mrs. Jones account via "Utilities", then "Customer Screen" the browse for Mrs. Jones. This opens to a 3 Tab customer screen. Go to the history tab. There are two choise to display by...Vehicle and Customer. Pick customer and all vehicles ever owned by her will show up. Even if the vehicle is deleted. Just double click and print.

To the moderator that moved my thread from Enhancement Request to the Tips & Ideas forum, please undo this action as I feel that this is not a matter of "How to," but a matter of a lack of functionality for which I request the development team consider implementing. Thank you.

Paul,

Thanks for this. While this effectively has the functionality that I'm looking for, it is a bit cumbersome in that it takes too many clicks to get to the information you're looking for and there is no sorting ability on the resulting list of invoices. Additionally, there seems to be no way to "undelete" a vehicle from this screen.

This entire process could be improved upon by having a "View Archived Vehicles" button on the customer's vehicle selection screen that takes you straight to a list of vehicles that have been archived, and then clicking a button or double-clicking the specific vehicle to view that vehicle's history. Of course, there should be functionality to unarchive a vehicle if necessary.

ARS,

Your suggestion is essentially the same as Brianp87's, which is as I said to him, not quite what we're looking for. It is, at best, a band-aid approach to the problem. You shouldn't have to go through that entire rigmarole to clean up a customer's account and/or view history on disposed-of vehicles.

[ARS]

Sorry just trying to help... Letting you know how we handle it. I totally agree with you that an Archive vehicle Button or procedure to do so would be great. The Archive button also needs to remove the vehicle from emails that the customers receive. We get a ton of customers that want their vehicle removed from getting emails... Sometimes we do not even have an email listed on their account so Mitchell has their email... so it also needs to be archived from Mitchell side.
Thanks.
ARS

[madmoneymike5]

ARS,

Sorry. Didn't mean to sound crass. You having shared your method only helps to support my reasoning that this is a feature/function that is lacking. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

[timbre4]

This was added to the Enhancement Request list during the 2013-2015 cleanup project under way; the discussion in this thread explains how it can be accomplished today and therefore qualifies for Tips & Ideas.

http://managerforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1876

Archive Vehicle.png (79.56 KiB) Viewed 3742 times